I've been told I blacked out as the ritual concluded, and truthfully I had no memories of it. The entire day was fuzzy in my head, with chunks missing where I was sure the ritual would have been. I remembered discussing the ritual with my master summoner. He was a wizened old man called Anfony, and he always loved to say the more you know about summoning magic, the less you'd want to use it. As I awoke in the medical wing of the castle, I figured I'd learned a bit of what he'd been talking about. I had been overconfident going into the spell. My preparations had been rushed.
But then there were the dreams.
I was made to remain in that bed for three days to recover my strength. Anfony said that he spell had shifted as we unleashed it, and I took the brunt of it. He didn't have to tell me that was very unusual. If he was concerned about what it could mean, he kept his worries to himself. But he praised me for my strength. He said I should be proud of myself. The spell, he said, had latched onto me and me alone, that by the time it was over, he'd barely lost any of his mana and I'd lost nearly all of mine. It could have killed me, and would have if I'd been any weaker, he said. That it could have happened to anyone.
In the weeks that followed, I often wondered if it would have been better to have died that day.
For a month after the spell, my dreams were ****. Always different but always the same. Each night, I dreamed of the summoning, and in the dream-summoning, I felt a presence. It overwhelmed my mind in a way I'd never forget. It violated me, rummaging around my memories and picking through my mind like a burglar ransacking a house.
While in the grips of this ****, I would see vivid images, all fragmented, like dreams within dreams. In the images, it was always women. Screaming, crying, or just staring at nothing. I had the body of a man. I hurt them, **** them, and killed them, laughing at their pain.
All while I was held prisoner by the runaway spell, unable to speak or move or even think without being burned to ash by the power rushing through me.
Each night I would wake up in a cold sweat, unable to return to sleep. Always with a whispered voice echoing in my mind. "I see you, mage. You will serve me." I couldn't say how I knew, but I knew. That voice wasn't imagined and it wasn't a memory; it was real, it was evil, and it could see me.
I had many conversations with Anfony about what had happened, and I dove into many books, but the best theory we could come up with was that the spell had crossed a plane home to a great evil, and that the evil there had been able to touch my mind briefly during the summoning. "Summoning magic is devilishly tricky to get right, young one. And human beings are complex. Much more so than angels or demons, which are comparatively simple to call on. This was a dangerous thing our King asked of us. Let us be satisfied that our Hero is working out."
I believed the old man was right, but I couldn't shake the feeling that that evil presence really could see me. Even after the spell ended. I didn't like the feeling of being watched. Anfony assured me that only a being in our own plane could touch me in any way, and we could confirm objectively that the only thing that crossed over was our Hero. We were safe. And the dreams had stopped. That was a good sign.
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